Day 25 – 17/4/2011 – Alice Springs

Day 25 – 17/4/2011 – Alice Springs

After a better night sleep we headed off early to the Alice Springs market.  This was a great experience and I was surprised about how multicultural Alice Springs is, we were able to buy food from an assortment of countries – Pete chose Asian Duck Pancakes and the kids had frozen mango smoothies!!

The lady on the right painted our canvas, the other lady is her
sister



We also bought our first Aboriginal Art painting!!  But first of all we had to learn how not to get ripped off, luckily we were shopping with our friends who told us what to look for, including making sure the story of the painting was written on the back and of course we could haggle the price!! I fell in love with so many of the paintings and would have bought heaps except that we had budget constraints, so I had to be happy with one.  Zac also brought a little canvas for his room.  To make the experience authentic we made sure we got a photo of the artist with our canvas.

The markets also gave us a chance to catch up with other families that we had met so far on the road, Alice Springs isn’t a very big place.

We also dropped into Target as we needed to buy a new camera, for some reason I had been dropping our camera and on the last drop at Finke Gorge I broke it.

After lunch the adults settled into serious relaxation mode and the kids spent time playing or watching movies. 

Late in the afternoon we headed off Olive Pink Botanic Gardens to test out the new camera.  The Botanic Gardens were beautiful but as we drove in Callum announced that they were nothing like the Wollongong Botanical Gardens, as they weren’t “green” enough, it took a little bit of explaining for him to understand that this area was arid so there would not be lush green vegetation as he was expecting.

Within the gardens was a short hill climb that gave a fabulous 360 view of Alice Springs.  I have to confess that the landscape is nothing like I expected!!  I thought Alice Springs was flat, as flat as the eye could see but I was terribly wrong. It is a small regional town surrounded by the most majestic ranges and dissected by two rivers – the Todd River and the Charles River.  Both rivers are currently dry and there for the locals have multiple uses for them, including picnicking in, sleeping in, driving cars in and just hanging out in – sort of like an inland beach.  Melinda tells me that people also ride their horses in the dry rivers!!